»I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. What a subject for an opera!« wrote an 18-year-old Umberto Giordano in his diary after seeing a performance of Victorien Sardou’s play »Fedora« in Naples in 1885. »If no one gets to it before me, I’m going to set it to music!«

Such was the magnetism of the material to the budding composer. Twelve years and several failed pitches later Giordano and the dramatist finally came to terms over an adaptation. By this time Giordano was a leading exponent of verismo, a sub-genre committed to realistic storylines and straight, linear narratives and which spread from Italy to every corner of the opera world from the 1890s onwards. Moreover, Giordano was remarkable for his veristic style, composing from a purely theatrical perspective: theatre was the lode star for all his compositional work. In his treatise on FEDORA, Giordano’s contemporary Julius Korngold distilled his style as follows: »Giordano’s ear is almost entirely visual. His music takes its vivacity almost exclusively from the action on stage.«

In adapting FEDORA Giordano and librettist Arturo Colautti abridged the storyline, deleted superfluous characters and focused on the core issues. In the interests of tension everything serves the compelling dynamism of the story. In Korngold’s words: »He can be floating like a butterfly one moment and whizzing forward like an arrow the next. He’s a master of atmosphere: the landmine is laid and primed with cold precision and detonates with perfect timing.«

That Korngold’s laudatory words hit the mark is evinced early in the opera, when Princess Fedora Romazov, in one of the few arias in the piece, trills with joy at her impending marriage only for her fiancé to arrive, bleeding from a gunshot. As servants and doctor rush to the aid of the dying man, an inspector is already calling to question the young widow and her assembled staff. Quite apart from the preliminary game of cards and our introduction to half a dozen bit-part characters, all the aforementioned action happens within the first ten minutes of the curtain rising.

Not only does Giordano pack in the action in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years before; his dramaturgical structure also anticipates the three elements of drama - surprise, suspense and mystery – an approach which is not destined to catch on until the advent of cinema. Audience and characters alike are taken aback (i.e. surprised) by the sudden appearance of the wounded fiancé and immediately fall to wondering who could have shot him. And although the signs point to Loris Ipanov as the guilty party, his motive remains unclear (i.e. a mystery).

Only later do we discover that he acted in self-defence. Unlike Loris himself, we also know that Fedora has already shopped his family to the Russian authorities, and from then on we follow the cascade of disastrous events from Fedora’s point of view: the news that Loris’s family has died in a dungeon – and Fedora’s inevitable confession that it was her doing (suspense).

No one has described this kind of epic arc of tension as well as Alfred Hitchcock, the »master of suspense«: If you have a group of people seated round a table and a bomb goes off under them, the shock lasts for a few seconds, but if the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, the suspense lasts for the duration of the scene.

It was precisely that tingling feeling that came over the 18-year-old Giordano in the theatre and which he applied uniquely, years later, to the opera stage.